RTP and the house edge: why we don’t hide it

RTP — return to player — is the share of everything staked that comes back to players on average, over a very large number of games. An RTP of 95% means that for every 100 staked, about 95 comes back as won skins. The remaining 5 is the house edge.

“On average” is the key part. RTP says nothing about a single upgrade: one game ends in a win or a loss, never in 95% of your stake. Over a handful of games results swing widely in both directions; only over thousands of games do they drift towards the RTP.

On DOTAGRADE the chance you see before every upgrade comes from one formula: chance = 0.95 × stake ÷ target price.

• Balance in the stake counts at its full value.
• An item in the stake counts at 100% of its market price.
• A target costs 100% of its market price. The extra covers the marketplace fee we pay when you withdraw the skin to Steam.
• The chance is capped at 80%. A target so close in price to your stake that the chance would be higher cannot be picked.

The coefficient 0.95 is the same for every player. It does not depend on your balance, your history or how long you have been playing.

Say you stake 900.00 ⬢ of balance on a target that costs 1,800.00 ⬢. The chance is 0.95 × 900.00 ⬢ ÷ 1,800.00 ⬢ = 47.5%.

If you could play this exact upgrade many times, you would win the target in 47.5% of games. On average that is 47.5% × 1,800.00 ⬢ = 855.00 ⬢ per game — 95% of your 900.00 ⬢ stake. The 45.00 ⬢ difference is the house edge.

Now stake an item with a market price of 900.00 ⬢ instead. It counts as 900.00 ⬢, so the chance on the same target is 47.5% and the average return is 855.00 ⬢ — about 95% of the item’s market price. Staking items costs a little more than staking balance, because an item is taken in below its market price.

Running an upgrader costs money: servers, payment processing, buying skins for withdrawals, support, security. A site with an RTP of 100% or more would lose money on every game, and would either close or find a less visible way to make it back.

So a margin is not a trick in itself. It is the price of the entertainment — much like a cinema ticket pays for the cinema, not only for the film.

The problem starts when you cannot see the margin. If a site shows a chance but not how it was calculated, the edge can be anything — and can quietly change from day to day, or from player to player.

That is why we publish the formula and the coefficient, and why every upgrade can be checked on the fairness page. Take any upgrade, divide the stake by the target price, multiply by 0.95, and you get the chance you were shown. If the numbers ever do not add up, we want to hear about it.

• In the long run, playing costs about 5% of what you stake from balance, and a bit more when you stake items. Treat that as the price of the game.
• A higher chance does not change the RTP — it means smaller wins more often. A lower chance means bigger wins less often.
• No strategy, timing or order of targets beats the coefficient. Plan your budget with that in mind — see Play with a clear head.